Various scientific and patent publications are referred to herein. Each is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
To monitor the health of patients, identify infectious diseases, screen for cancer, and monitor the safety of water and food supplies, it is often desirable or even necessary to concurrently detect and measure the concentrations of multiple analytes in a given sample. Such analytes can include various chemicals, proteins, viruses, DNA, RNA, cells, bacteria, antibodies, and other biological and non-biological markers.
It is known that accurate and reliable biomarker-based cancer screening requires the concurrent quantification of multiple proteins, and, in certain cases, can entail the establishment of a gene profile of cancer and pre-cancer cells. In the latter case, one takes advantage of the fact that precancerous and cancerous cells exhibit a change in the transcription levels of many genes. Accordingly, the detection of the deviations in mRNA levels provides an informative target for cancer diagnostics. Establishing a gene profile, however, requires the quantification of from about 10 to about 30 genes, which quantification, in turn, is most efficiently accomplished by the use of an array of multiple sensors.
Existing devices for performing such analyses have certain drawbacks, and often require the use of large, complex devices, including cameras, fluorescence meters, optical scanners, and the like. The size and complexity of such devices renders optical detection techniques ill-suited for use in portable devices.
Because of the limitations inherent in multiple analyte detection systems that rely on optical detection, there is a need for devices capable of detecting multiple analytes on a non-optical basis. There is also a related need for methods of fabricating such devices.